NEXT LEVEL COACHING - DECISION MAKING DURING GAMES INTRODUCTION

                                     

With 2022 pre-season just around the corner, we're continuing on with the "Next Level Coaching" theme in a mammoth series of posts based off this study, titled "What Cognitive Mechanism, When, Where and Why? Exploring the Decision Making of Amateur and Elite Rugby Union Players During Competitive Matches."

It's a huge piece on it's own as you can see if you clicked the link, which took me a good 7 days to read, summarise and re-order into what I'll present here.

When copy and pasted into word it was 50 pages long which I managed to whittle down to 15 pages and 5,400 words of dot points, of which the following series of posts will consist of.

This is literally "next level coaching" as you'll learn a lot of new coaching terms but more importantly you'll gain an amazing insight into actual player decision making during games and all the processes they go through to reach each and every final decision.

If you're coaching and training is not set up to at it's very core, improve the decision making of your players, then are you really coaching?

Every tactical, technical and physical action is a decision made based on what's going around the player, whether they have the ball or not, so if you're not training to improve decision making then I'm not sure what you can expect from your players on game day. 

Before you can train the what, you need to understand the why, and this 18 or so post series will literally tell you all about this.

Each post will begin with any new terms you'll come across for the first time with a quick explanation of what it means to guide you through all these posts.

As I mentioned above I have re-ordered the information and broken it up into categories/subjects which I think makes it a lot easier to digest as the actual content jumps around a lot and could cause a lot of confusion when not familiar with all the new terms.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback throughout the next few weeks as these go up then don't hesitate to hit me up on the socials about it.

INTRODUCTION

NEW TERMS

Cognitive Mechanism - the tactical, psychological, technical, physical action decided upon by combining perception and action.

• The crux of decision making is to determine what cognitive mechanism to use, where to use it, when to use it and why use that particular option
• Personal perspective is dependent on stored mental representations that may or may not facilitate the retrieval of appropriate responses in time pressured competition environments
• In team sports the time available to perceive, access memory and then act on it alters rapidly between game moments
• Physical markers were previously used differentiate between players but those gains are now becoming more marginal and a more consistent differentiator of performance in invasion sports can be aligned with expertise in game intelligence and decision making

NEXT POST - TIME